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On Wednesday February 15, 2017, Ambience Data was preparing to give the pitch of their lives. We were accepted into the 500 Startups family in mid-October along with 43 other start-ups who were founded across North America in addition to India, Korea, China, and Nigeria (just to name a few). After 4 months of mentorship and networking with the batch 19 team in Silicon Valley, our Founder, Nisha Sarveswaran, was ready to show what Ambience Data can do to improve environmental health by creating innovative solutions in a growing IoT field.

Along with Nisha, Sandi Chieu (Operations) and I were present at demo day. We arrived at the Computer History Museum for 8am where we began setting up our booth complete with our 3 hardware devices, our dashboard on display, and our pollutant map created by our big data analysts.

The first round of pitches started around 12pm PST, accompanied by the Queen of Hearts himself, Dave McClure, who urged the crowd to make their voices heard in the faces of injustice and inequality. Rhyme Combinator, the elusive trio of Silicon Valley rappers, brought the house down and at around 12pm PST, the first round of pitches started. Fast-forward to 3pm PST, which was the scheduled time for Nisha to pitch. She introduced Ambience Data, what we do, our financial stats, and how we can actually help save the world through IoT, innovative software, and data analytics.

A number of attendees including investors and press came to our booth after Nisha's pitch and asked us a couple of questions. I wrote down the most frequently asked questions and addressed them here:

1. "What exactly do you do?"

We are an environmental data analytics company who does both indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring. We want to be a leader in obtaining data and data analytics by using data from our devices along with open source data (government, pollution data, traffic data, etc).

2. "What do your devices do?"

Our indoor air monitor called the BlueJay monitors for CO2, PM2.5, PM10, temperature, humidity, and pressure. Our outdoor air monitor called the Starling also monitors for PM2.5, PM10, temperature, humidity, and pressure but has an additional 8 sensor connections to fit any kind of environmental parameter that needs monitoring. Our third device, called the Sparrow, is our communication hub that has 4 sensor connections and is capable of connecting any standard legacy sensor to the cloud and onto our web-based dashboard.

3. "Can you explain your dashboard?"

Our dashboard shows users the data from their devices in real-time. A map of the device location along with historical data and charts are on display for easy readability. Reports and data analytics are also offered through the dashboard to give information like predictive pollutant trends based on the time of day/year or the relationships between pollutant concentrations and hospital admission rates, for instance.

4. "What kind of clients do you serve?"

We currently have clients who work in chemical lab industries, governments, and schools on a global scale. Right now, we are contacting distribution companies to partner with.

5. "What do you mean by data analytics?"

With this data collected from our proprietary hardware devices and open-sourced data, we can create valuable insights to, essentially, save the world. We use our data points to train our geospatial algorithms to understand the health impact of everyone at a 1 square km radius, which is ground breaking. This is what truly sets us apart from the rest of the monitoring companies in the market.

Ambience Data is thankful for being a part of batch 19 and 500 Startups where we received valuable advice on building and growing our company. It was a pleasure to meet all the other fine start-ups there.